Looking Out.
Looking In.
Always Edgy.

30 March 2010

A topflight editor transplants herself and lands a book deal

When a writer friend pointed me to a story titled Losing It in the New York Times Magazine of March 28th, 2010, I
rushed out to my living room and pulled out the magazine to read what,
seemingly, was a heartwarming story of a woman in the writing world who pulled
herself out of misery.

In her essay, Browning lays bare her life after being laid
off from House & Garden in November 2007, just a little before Thanksgiving. She
writes lyrically about how she was sucked into the quicksand of dread and
depression but willed her body out of the vortex of over-eating and
slovenliness by discovering the joy of gardening and unearthing the meaning
of the slow life in a new home.

I was getting ready to shed a few tears while reading the
exquisite excerpt from her memoir, Slow Love, when I decided to dig around a bit
in the weedy garden that was supposedly Browning’s life following her layoff.
What I dredged up made her story wilt right in my hands.

During the two and a half years after she was given the pink
slip, Browning disposed of the first house and garden, moved into her other,
second, house and garden, deftly shifted gears into the blog lane with an
impressive online presence called Slow Love Life, A Conversation with
Dominique Browning,
and careened into the fast lane of publishing success with a book deal for Slow
Love: How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas & Found Happiness.

Browning has a three-decade resume that writers like me
would kill for. She is the author of three books,
has written for O magazine, Food
& Wine, The New York Times Book
Review, and Departures. She has also been an editor at Esquire, Texas Monthly
and Newsweek and she has a column,
“Personal Nature”, that is her “distinctive take on all things environmental”
for the Environmental Defense Fund website.By her standards, I should be overloading on Prozac and,
simultaneously, getting sloshed on Guinness Stout with a hint of lime. May be
there is something seriously wrong with me for deflecting rejection like a
woman? “The folding of the magazine was ruthless,” Browning writes,
recalling the shock of the closure of the magazine. “Without warning, our world
collapsed.”

I couldn’t help reflecting, meanly, on that boomerang called
karma. Did Browning ever think of how the freelance writers she assigned
stories to at House & Garden might have felt when the stories they bled over were
slashed without warning by executive editors like her?The paltry kill fees aren’t even enough
to cover a sandwich and a drink at a Manhattan deli. Almost daily, I see
freelance writers (many of them single women) on my writers’ forum handle
rejection with a proud face, uncertain where the next assignment is going to
come from. They lumber on in the petering market, taking any writing
project–whether it’s a ghostwriting project, a newsletter creation assignment,
a copywriting job–to inch towards the monthly income they need.

Did Browning
care to ponder over how her sob story would hardly resonate with the stable of
many thousand writers who are now out of a job, thanks to the slow demise of
print journalism? Most of all, did she realize how her very brief season in her
vegetable bed of rejection couldn’t even compare to the perennial tossing into
the compost slush pile that freelance writers like me endure–over and over and
over–from editors like her?

When I went back to the essay after reading Browning’s bio,
I was rotting with fury. For a reason that’s wedged somewhere between a
woman’s homing instinct to play mother hen to her family and her primordial
need to uphold the domestic fortress, I could simply not swallow Browning’s
tying her umbilical cord to her cubicle.

“Without work, who was I?” she
wonders. When she discusses unemployment
and her mental state, my brain is on rototill mode. “Being unemployed is a lot like being depressed,” she
writes.

I happen to be in touch
with many talented mothers who, for reasons of their own, are unemployed, yet,
passionately involved in school-related and community-related activities. They
are making the public school system in the United States a much better place to
be, while women like Dominique Browning have been showing America how to make
the home and garden pretty and nice.

I couldn’t glean much about her life as a mother upon
reading the essay. But I do hope Browning took days off to be with her two
boys, baked brownies with them, played an active part in the parent committee
at their school, fretted about how they fared at school and asked them how they
dealt with a mother who was intensely committed to her work at a national
magazine. I bow to her ego and her rabid need to support herself all her life.
But I do wonder how many employed women, especially given Browning’s legacy,
will turn soggy and limp in that brief, uprooted state of unemployment.

Behold a topflight editor like Dominique Browning with a rolodex of
topnotch contacts–which would ultimately put her transparent memoir in the
pages of nothing less than the NYTimes magazine so that Atlas, her publisher,
can be guaranteed whopping sales–spiral into a “whiplashing tailspin” of
despair and depression?

Found your blog after stumbling on D Brown's blog. I too researched her and discovered an old interview with Charlie Rose. Needless to say I weeded it as soon as I could. Then I found pages of her activities in the New York Social Diary. No wonder she can sell organic soap on the internet. I enjoyed your comments immensely because they mirror my feelings exactly.

Thank you, Liz. It's unfortunate more writers haven't written about this. For a while there I wondered if I were the only alien out there who felt this way. I'm glad there's someone out there who feels that things don't add up in the case of Ms. Browning.